It’s Holy Saturday, an often-overlooked part of Holy Week. But it’s so important to recognize this quiet day, I’m discovering, as we look back on Good Friday’s somberness and peer ahead to tomorrow’s Easter joy. This day, when Jesus rests in his tomb, helps us become more aware of all God has done for us, meeting the aches of the human heart with his companionship, even in moments of darkness. There’s a tender, touching meaning in the scene.

For all we say, I wonder if we want what this season offers, this Holy Week so focused on the Cross of Christ. There’s glory in the message we tell on Good Friday, but also a bit of the gory: An innocent man put through a horrible death. The Cross, when we look hard, was dramatic: a trauma, even. It feels gritty, like sand in the mouth when you’re at the beach, gravelly instead of the smoothness of water or silk.

My new friend Margery Kennelly told a story in a recent sermon that made me think of how gripping and possibly off-putting the crucifixion of Christ can seem.

A few days ago I took a tumble down the stairs of our back deck. 

It was windy and I was carrying an empty flattened packing box in one hand, and a house fixture I’d just painted in the other, taking it all to the garage, when a gust caught the cardboard like a sail, threw me off balance, and I went down headfirst. (I know: Really dumb.)

A cartoonist, noticing how Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day sometimes (if rarely, like today) fall on the same day, imagined how greeting card companies might kill two birds with one stone.

Like a saying on a card that goes,

Roses are red / Violets are blue

Lent is beginning / No chocolates for you

 Or he thought of another card’s greeting, recalling the Episcopal prayer book’s language for our human condition:

Won’t you be my valentine…

you miserable offender?

I have a passed-down photograph taken of me when just an infant. While my parents are now both deceased, for decades the gold-plated frame holding the almost sepia-toned image graced their bedroom dresser.

There was more behind the picture, as the saying goes, than the wall.

I’m chubby cheeked in the shot, two locks of my hair curled and pasted down on my forehead. I’m pushing myself up from my tummy on my baby-fat-laden forearms; someone off-camera—my mom? my dad?—had caught my attention. I’m delighting in the fuss, it seems, liking getting my picture taken.

And to look at me then you’d say I greeted my first weeks and months with wide smiles, with a child’s wide inquisitive open eyes.

And I see that I arrived, as I believe we all do when born into this wonder-filled and fallen world, with a longing to be loved and liked, along with occasional fears that I would not. I smiled for the photographer, but I must also have known in some moments a rattled need for security.

A link to my Christian Century interview with the revered preacher and author Fleming Rutledge is found here. …